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raving_liberal's: "Brave" has nothing to do with it.

-AND-

Christy Fiscer's A Healthy Baby Isn't All That Matters

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Walking along Broadway in Capitol Hill is a form of advertising. You don't have to look good, but you do have to present yourself as an individual; you have to strut with the knowledge that you are the only one exactly like you on that street. Not everyone knows the rules, but the natives who stroll up and down, they know. You can see it in the ways that they walk. Every one of us shouting to the others with our movements and our clothes who we are.

* * * * *

Teenagers standing on a grassy clearing by the Lowe building chatting with one another in the sunlight. I assumed they were in high school, on a campus tour to get them interested in college. Maybe they were younger and I'm getting too old to tell, but I'm quite certain that they weren't as young as their adult supervisor treated them. Though I could not see him, I could clearly hear him shout over them, "We are going to go inside. You must use your inside voices." How condescending? He's not talking to kindergarteners, and he's not talking to young adults with developmental disabilities. He's talking to a group of teens. What was most insulting was that he said it not once, but three times. "Use your inside voices," he called again as I walked out of ear shot.

* * * * *

When I brought my exhausted, distraught child home, a child complaining of everything from sore throat (which she had this morning) to chills to knee pain to wrist pain, but not once of emotional distress, I did not expect after accepting her assessment that she needed a nap to get a call from her teacher. Apparently, Ana's behavior today (crying, trying to lay down, complaining of a sore throat, muttering self-hating epithets under her breath) were not only disruptive to her day, but to those of her classmates. "They were picking up on it." She didn't like the tone it was setting in her classroom. Ana had said of her day when we got home that she want to be homeschooled because she "just can't handle it," meaning, as she explained, that she couldn't handle being forced to perform as if she was feeling 100% when in fact, she was feeling quite ill. Her teacher had taken her aside to talk with her, and brought up the possiblity of emotional issues at the core of her distress today, and apparently Ana broke down in tears and started talking about incidents that happened months ago (like attempting to steal from me, for which she felt so guilty she told the school counselor). Her teacher now wants to schedule a time for all four of us (Ana, teacher, counselor, and myself) to get together after school in the near future so we can talk about Ana's emotional issues. I sat on the phone for fifteen or twenty minutes listening to her teacher talk about the problems Ana was causing for her class, but put into terms that were supposed to sugar-coat the real meaning ("We need to be able to figure out the best way to handle this; I need to know how to effectively address Ana when she talks about these feelings in the class"). I was sitting next to Craig the whole time and when I hung up and told him what the conversation entailed, he said, "you need to get a second opinion, I don't think that doctor did enough." When I asked him what he meant, he went on to suggest that perhaps Ana is feeling depressed because her body is sick, rather than the teacher's assumption that she's sick because she's emotionally distressed. Either one is possible.

I went to give Ana a massage to help her wake up and participate with us for the evening, only to find that she'd wet the bed. She did it several times a few months ago, and then I thought we'd helped her through it. Before that she'd been dry since she was three. My body is falling apart; I have to struggle to get through each day, and I'm not sure where to find the energy to help her. I don't know what else to do. The doctor we went to did very little, sent us to various other places to get the tests done that he should have done in the first place, and didn't follow up in any meaningful way. He also made Ana feel very uncomfortable when he asked her to pull down her pants. She's never had a vaginal exam before (not since she was an infant and they weren't doing an exam, they were placing a bag on her to test for a UTI), and while it wasn't an exam of that magnitude, it did involve a strange man (we'd never seen him before), touching her pubic mound searching for a hernia. A hernia? Really? She's eight.

Ana's teacher made it clear she expected to see Ana in class tomorrow. Given that Ana is napping for the third time this evening, I don't think it's going to happen.

Ana Monday Symptoms

Sore throat this morning.
Gave throat comfort tea, zinc lozenge.

Came home feeling lethargic.
Allowed three naps before dinner.

102.2 temp.
Gave Tylenol Jr.

Pain "behind belly button" before dinner.
Took away orange juice, gave water.

Dinner uneaten. Still lethargic. Still feverish (99.6).
Gave water, massaged lightly back, neck, legs. Neck and legs very sore (elicited pained cries).

Purged stomach contents without feeling nausea beforehand.
Gave water, bowl, dry bed.

I wonder, does her teacher still think it's emotional distress?